Austin Active Directory

Austin Active Directory Remediation and Refresh Project

7/24/2015 - The expiration of ITS granted temporary Austin Active Directory (AAD) entitlements to Unaffiliated (Guest) EIDs on May 20, 2015 marked the end of this project.

ITS would like to thank the campus community and TSCs in assisting with the success of this project.

More information can be found on the project wiki. Please contact your Technical Support Coordinator (TSC) or local help desk technician for information and assistance with setting the AAD Entitlement. Additionally, you may contact the ITS Help desk at help@its.utexas.edu.

Changes and updates are required to the Austin Active Directory (AD) and enterprise services such as Austin Exchange Messaging Service (AEMS), Office 365 and Austin Disk this fiscal year to remediate operational issues identified by the Office of Internal Audits (IA) to reduce the risk of inappropriate use of university resources or the disclosure, modification or deletion of confidential data. A refresh of the aging AD hardware is also required to ensure continued high availability of the service.

Business Need and Background

IA performed an audit of the Austin AD and AEMS in direct relationship to EIDs and user accounts in April 2013, citing guidelines in Section 5 of the university’s Information Resource Use and Security Policy. The findings of the audit resulted in a high level recommendation: access to AD and those critical enterprise services that leverage AD such as AEMS, Office365, and Austin Disk should be disabled or de-provisioned when (1) accounts are no longer in use or (2) accounts no longer have a valid association or entitlement with the university.

The hardware for the AD environment requires a refresh to maintain warranty and support status. Additionally, new domain controllers will be added to enable efficient authentication of UT services in the cloud.

Project Description

Information Technology Services (ITS) will establish an automated process to enable and disable accounts in AD based upon EID affiliations and entitlements as established in UT’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) framework. This process will ensure AD and other enterprise services leveraging AD such as AEMS, Office 365, and Austin Disk will be accessible by EIDs with an active affiliation or a necessary entitlement. The project will be broken into 4 steps:

AD Entitlement: This step creates the ability for AD Organizational Unit (OU) owners to grant an entitlement to an EID. Accounts with the entitlement will apply to AD EID accounts.

AD Sweep: This step will include the checking of all existing AD accounts for a valid affiliation and disabling those without valid affiliations. This includes disabling AEMS and Office 365 emails accounts that do not have valid affiliations. All services relying upon Austin Active Directory for authentication, such as Austin Disk, will also be affected.

AD Provisioning Update: Update provisioning tools to ensure accounts are enabled or disabled based on affiliation and entitlement changes.

AD Refresh and Cloud Bridge: This step will include upgrading the four (4) domain controllers to new hardware and Windows Server 2012 R2. This step also includes adding two (2) new domain controllers with public IP addresses for the cloud bridge.

Project Goals

Prevent misuse of university resources including critical applications, home directories, and email accounts.

Prevent the disclosure, modification, or deletion of confidential university data by removing former employees’ access.